Of course. And it’s only progressed to fewer and fewer high priests tending each temple of bounty. Even automated maintenance isn’t unusual any more.
Self driving cars are in their infancy. I think trucking and driving jobs are safe for the time being.
Endless hype and media love aside, I don’t think we will see self-driving vehicles as any major part of our current infrastructure. At least, not outside the groomed modern layouts of some California cities where, oddly enough, most self-drivers are being developed and “proven.”
Self-driving will be the engine that drives a separate transportation infrastructure. We won’t rebuild our aging roads and highways as much as parallel them with new ones that meet auto-drive needs. That’s how technological history progresses. There are very few cases of wholesale evolution within an existing system.
The way that Amazon does this is the robot lifts the entire rack containing the needed thing and brings it to the stock clerk. (They bought a company called Kiva Systems for this and, from what I’ve heard, have thousands of these robots in use.) That avoids the whole issue of designing a robot to pick a randomly shaped object off a shelf.
As for this, I’ve seen YouTube videos demonstrating the process. They send you a paper that has a target and perhaps some sort of 2D code imprinted on it. You lay this out in your backyard or on the driveway and the drone uses this as the target for dropping the package. I agree that drone delivery sounds ludicrous, but they are completely serious about deploying it.
Exactly. It’s become a matter of convenience to use a travel agent, rather than a matter of necessity.
Back in the day, you kind of had to go through a travel agent if you wanted to say… fly to Rome, stay a few days, go to Florence, stay a few days, and then go to Milan and stay a few days and fly back. They had the flight info, the hotel info and all that stuff.
Now you can do it all online yourself, but travel agents frequently have more experience with the system than you do, and may also have greater experience with the whole process- for example, when we went on our last trip, we had a travel agent plan the basics of hotels and flights. She happened to have been at it for 20-something years, and knew which hotels were better than others and WHY, and also knew which ones have better off-season rates than others. So we ended up at a great place in Rome where the view out of our window was onto the Pantheon and the square, and we didn’t pay astronomical prices, because the place has really generous off-season rates (we were there in mid-December), unlike their tourist-season rates which are a lot higher.
I have a feeling that jobs that are relatively rote, but not quite what we’d think of as robotic are next on the chopping block as robots get smarter. For example, something like yard-mowing is probably going to be handled by something akin to a bigger Roomba in the future, and so will things like fast-food preparation, shelf-stocking, etc…
In California you can buy liquor in the grocery store, not just wine and beer. And there are still plenty of liquor stores - though I must confess the last time I went into a liquor store all I bought was lottery tickets (as a Christmas gift for my coworkers, everyone got a $1 lottery scratcher).
Do they still have the Sunday beer-aisle curtains?
That one might take longer than you think, since yard-mowing involves spinning blades. When my Roomba runs into my foot, I don’t lose any toes…
Not that long. Robotic, Roomba-like automated lawnmowers already exist.
Obviously, technologically we can have a lawn-mowing roomba. The problem is that it isn’t safe for children and other living things.
Lots of technology like this can exist for decades as a curiosity, but nobody can figure out how to make it economical or safe. Then someone figures it out and a marginal technology becomes mainstream overnight.
Look at the iPhone. We had decades of people trying to build something like this, but all previous commercial models were total failures. Then Apple figures out how to put all the features into a viable package and 9 years later smartphones are pretty much synonymous with “phone”.
But of course this phone wouldn’t be useful without the ecosystem of web services that it can access, ubiquitous wifi, ubiquitous cell coverage and so on. So it isn’t just that smartphones now have better batteries and displays and UI. Without worthwhile content/communication channels available it’s just a toy. The phone itself is just a way of slipping the vast infrastructure of the modern communications industry into your pocket.
It seems to me that self-driving trucks will first be used on those long stretches of highway between point A and point B. You’ll still need a driver/attendant for lots of tasks, but allowing that guy to sleep in the back for a few hours while the truck drives itself across Kansas can eliminate a lot of the inhumanity of the job of driving a truck. Keeping the truck between the lines and keeping station between other vehicles and braking for unexpected obstructions is already a solved problem. City driving is the real challenge.
Self-driving taxis have started in Singapore and Uber is about to unleash self-driving cars in Pittsburgh.
Sunday beer, wine and liquor sales have been legal in Massachusetts since the Romney administration although the hours are slightly shorter than the rest of the week. You can also buy beer and wine in a lot of convenience stores and some supermarkets. I haven’t seen the actual curtains for years although I am sure there are still some around. Most places just lock the coolers and turn off the lights when beer sales are prohibited. Full liquor stores aren’t even open except during legal hours.
In a 2.5 km area with predefined stops. Interesting but not really suggestive that we will all be taking automated taxis from point a to b anytime soon.
Since many AI applications operating in the real world will have to interact with humans (if only to not run over them), I suspect that in addition to their defined job they will have to have a lot of deep learning devoted to human interaction. Which leads me to wonder if something like the humanoid robots of science fiction will come to pass: general human recognition and interaction programming, with specialist modules plugged in for how to do an assigned task.
I think military vehicles will adopt self driving before commercial cars and trucks. Actually since the Soviet and now Russians are big on automation, I would be amazed if they are not already working on it.
That’s still faster than the nay-sayers have predicted. It won’t be long before most major cities have a presence.
When I started in 1980 there was one admin for about 30 people. When I stopped working there was one for about 150 and she was mostly bored. Not out of laziness - she looked for work, but there was little to do. Basically instead of one admin for 3 first level managers, there is now one per vice president.
In fact, though we have an active BevMo near us, a new big liquor store opened in a shopping center a few miles away.
We get wine from BevMo when it is on sale, but when our daughter got married and we got to buy the wine for the reception, we went to them to get advice and order large quantities of it. The store people were quite knowledgeable. I like our Safeway, but I’d never take wine advice from them.
I agree that ordering fast food from a person isn’t going to last long. There is no value add, and half the time some of your order is wrong. Like airline kiosks you can get more ordering stations with fewer people in less space.
Yes, but you can now buy booze on Sundays until 5. Truly, the late 20th century is almost here, here.
Even some California stores have beer curtains, if they’re 24-hour. It makes it easier to close off the beer and such for the offsale hours of 2-6 a.m.
Truly, the Church of Autonomous Vehicles has spread its word rapidly, and has only the most sincere converts. 